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Running AugerScan and AugerMap on Windows 7 – 10

AugerScan and AugerMap are “legacy” software applications originally developed for Windows 95 and 98, however they have been and continue to be updated for bug fixes, additional features, and operating system compatibility. Both applications (and the systems they run) are still going strong and support Windows 7 – 10.

While many customers are still content running their RBD-upgraded PHI systems on Windows XP (or 95-98!), Microsoft no longer supports those operating systems, making upgrading the OS or replacing those PCs inevitable. There are a few areas where the transitions is not as smooth as we’d yet like, and those are driver support and the legacy help system.

Drivers

RBD provides drivers for older Windows XP systems as well as drivers that are fully compatible with Windows 7 – 10. However, none of these drivers are currently digitally signed. Depending on your operating system, providing the rights to run unsigned drivers may be necessary upon installing the drivers and/or running the software.

Some of the errors you may encounter are cryptic, such as the following sometimes seen when installing unsigned drivers on Windows 10: “The hash for the file is not present in the specified catalog file”.

Thanks for the clarity, Microsoft!

The good news is that you should only have to take care of the issue once, not every time you are running the software. The bad news is the methods are different for each operating system version, and even different for the same exact operating system depending on the date it was installed and the PC BIOS.

For most versions of Windows, disabling driver signature enforcement can be accomplished easily by one of these methods.

For Windows 10 PCs that were installed (not updated) with build 1607 (Anniversary Edition), the Secure Boot feature of the BIOS must be turned off.

Help

The original Help system (largely unchanged since Windows 3.1) was phased out in Windows Vista. The context-sensitive help – also known as “what’s this?” or “right-click” help cannot be replaced (this was the information you would typically see for each field in a dialog box, for example). However, for Windows Vista through 8.1, Microsoft does provide separate downloads for the legacy help system; it’s just no longer installed in the operating system.

You can find most of those files on this Microsoft support page (scroll down to “Resolution”) For security reasons, Microsoft no longer supports this help format at all in Windows 10, and there are no third-party solutions available.

However, we’ve translated most of RBD’s help to HTML for both AugerScan and AugerMap. In each case, simply unzip the file to a convenient folder and run “index.html” in your browser.